To a native English speaker, the names ``Kelly'' and ``Kerry'' sound
quite different. To a native Japanese speaker, however, they sound
virtually identical.

What is important to one language's ear might sound insignificant to
another's, and it works both ways. For this reason, I have built in the
idea of fuzzy searching, whereby the search will often be able to
ignore those linguistic characteristics of a word's spelling (in romaji)
which might be missed by an English speaker.

For example, the capital city of Japan is not ``tokyo'', but ``toukyou''.
The long vowels are very important in Japanese, yet the English speaker
is used to glossing over such details as not being important to our speech.

To help
the non-native speaker find words more quickly, I've implemented what I
call a fuzzy search. A fuzzy search will attempt to mitigate the
difficulties non-native speakers have identifying the exact Japanese.

In a fuzzy search:

the length of vowels (and if long, how they're lengthened) is
ignored -- For example, ``to'' is considered the same as ``tou'',
``too'', or ``to-''.

the presence or absence of any small tsu is ignored.

the dual characters with the ji sound
(じ, ぢ) are considered to be equal.

the dual characters with the zu sound
(ず, づ) are considered to be equal.

It is
EXTREMELY IMPORTANT
to remember that words returned from a single fuzzy search may be
actually be pronounced completely differently,
and are may well sound completely and utterly unsimilar to a native
Japanese as, say, ``fish'' and ``happily'' do to a native English speaker.

As an example, consider the fuzzy search of ``tokyo''.
Among other, the following will be returned:

Notice that each entry とうきょう, とっきょ, とっきょう has
a different pronunciation, yet may sound generally similar to the ear of a
native English speaker.

There is a word in Japanese, ワープロ馬鹿, for someone
whose kanji-writing ability has suffered due to over-reliance on the
kana->kanji conversion systems used to input Japanese text on a computer.
They merely need to recognize the correct kanji, so their ability to
actually produce it diminishes. Don't let this kind of thing
happen with your pronunciation